On Garden Junk a woman made birdhouses out of old lunch boxes...you could do the same by drilling a hole in the front or even just making it LOOK like a birdhouse but have it not really be functional.

Use it somewhere in the house to hold items...how about a tissues? Will a tissue box fit in the one? Use it to hold your mail supplies like envelops and stamps? A message center..put a note pad and pen and keep it near the phone. Bills?

GL!

GL, I love the idea of a birdhouse. The rectangular mailbox has a couple of openings I can prop open. I will have to go over to the old house where I keep it and check it out. I do know it is one heavey mailbox. The other box is kind of roundish and I still haven't made up my mind what I will use it for. I will post pictures soon. Thnaks so much!

Lucy

Lucy,
GL means Good Luck. LOL I really must start adding my name all the time to the posts because I seem to be confusing a few people!

GL with your mailboxes :)

~Leslie

If you have a large yard you could mount one on a post at a distance from your house and stash extra gardening tools in it. I hate trucking to the far corner of the yard only to realize I've left something vital in the tool shed.

I was thinking that I didn't even get to use my rural mail box at the end of the lane in its regular function through quite a bit of the winter.

We have these beasts called "snowplows" that travel up and down the roads with wings hanging over the ditches to throw the snow way back off of the road, to leave room for later snowfalls.

The wings being not very compatible with mailboxes, the mailboxes come off second best when they wrestle.

After the first battering of the season, I brought the mailbox in to the house, concerned for its survival.

The corrolary of this was that it was necessary for me to travel 5 mi. total daily to the P.O. - on a number of days to suffer the disappointment of returning home ... enmpty-handed - but that would have been the same had my mailbox been operational.

Toward spring I was looking for my electric drills as I went about my affairs, as I hadn't seen them since my move here upwards of a year ago.

One day I put the mailbox on the workbench and went to work on bending out a number of bends, crooks and creases that had been added recently.

Did a fairly competent job, if I do say it myself (if one doesn't do a fair job, the mail lady won't deliver: she doesn't feel it to be her job to wrestle with mailboxes).

Used the recently-located electric drill with wire brush to clear off rust, then primed and painted, dealing with some problems in that the dribs and drabs in spray paint cans had been rescued from garbage about 6 years ago and now their internal stirring ball wouldn't move until major shaking took place ... which meant that chunky paint did an effective job of plugging spray heads.

Finally got the job done to my satisfaction and remounted the box at the end of the lane.

Now, though the flag may not be up, I can't see that until I get half way down the lane to the box ... may as well go the rest of the way: I need the exercise.

So much for my mail box ...

... well, until next major snowfall, anyway.

ole joyful